Asking 3 young millionaires how they make $1.8M, $5M, & $12M/year

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, today we're playing Shoot Your Shot, where we let founders come in, sit in the hot seat and pitch us their business. We got founders that have million dollar businesses all the way up to a hundred million dollar businesses. They get 15 minutes and in it, they start by telling us the one big number. Give us the pitch and shoot the shot. They get to ask any questions that they want.

**Shaan Puri** (0:17)
Yeah, we've done this in New York City. This time it's in San Francisco. Whether you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, if you're working out right now, whatever you're doing right now, you need to stop and go to Spotify or go to YouTube. Look us up on My First Million and let us know in the comments which city you want us to go to next.
All right, you want to bring the first guy out?

**Nick Haschka** (0:44)
All right, let's bring him out.
What's up? How's it going?

**Shaan Puri** (0:51)
Nick, what's good? Hit us with the big number.

**Nick Haschka** (0:53)
All right. So I'm running a backup generator company in California.

**Shaan Puri** (0:57)
Okay.

**Nick Haschka** (0:57)
We're doing about 12 million in ARR right now.

**Shaan Puri** (0:59)
Wow.

**Nick Haschka** (1:00)
And we've got line of sight to 14 million this year and contracted to go out to around 25

**Sam Parr** (1:06)
Okay. So the big number is 12 million in revenue and you're, what are you providing for people you provide?

**Nick Haschka** (1:12)
Backup generator sales and service.

**Sam Parr** (1:14)
So what does that mean? Like I'm a house, I'm a homeowner out here.

**Nick Haschka** (1:17)
That's right.

**Sam Parr** (1:18)
I would just buy a unit, I rent a unit or you sell to power companies?

**Nick Haschka** (1:20)
We'll sell generators. Like a Generac. Service generators. We typically do higher end units.
Our clientele are typically the high end estate properties as well as large, more regulated facilities. So every telecom tower, every nursing home, every police station, fire station, every data center.

**Sam Parr** (1:39)
So it's B2B.

**Nick Haschka** (1:40)
Mostly B2B. We will, in the product that the high end estate properties get, that's a, it's an industrial product.

**Sam Parr** (1:46)
So there's all these businesses that as soon as somebody says them, I'm like, oh, of course. Yet they've been a complete blind spot to me my entire life. I never thought about it once. And I always wonder, how did that guy start thinking about this? So how did you realize this is a business I could go be a part of?

**Nick Haschka** (1:59)
So I started my career in management consulting, where you dabble around a bunch of different industries.
At one point I landed in a corporate job at NRG, large power company in the US, was doing innovation projects there, strategy. And one of the areas we had the hardest time finding good expertise in was backup generators.

**Shaan Puri** (2:17)
And a backup generator is if your power goes down for one minute or 12 hours because of a storm or an earthquake or something, this thing kicks on, you're good to go.

**Nick Haschka** (2:26)
You do not want the power to go out when you're on the surgery table, unless there's a backup generator there to cover.

**Shaan Puri** (2:31)
Great.

**Nick Haschka** (2:32)
And so every surgery center, every hospital, they've all got them.

**Shaan Puri** (2:35)
When did you start the company?

**Nick Haschka** (2:36)
So I acquired the first one. And so this has been an acquisition venture. It started with a thesis, went around looking for trying to find us a service provider to buy. We bought our first one in January 2024, and then bought a second one about five, six months later.

**Sam Parr** (2:50)
And describe the industry. So is this a bunch of mom and pop companies, a few large players? What does the industry even look like?

**Nick Haschka** (2:56)
So very barbelled. So we go head to head up against big, big industrial names like Caterpillar and Cummins and Generac on the direct side where we're competing for the business of marquee names, big counties, big state contracts, and things like that. We also go head to head against the small mom and pop players. But really, the lion's share of the market is owned by the bigger platforms.

**Sam Parr** (3:19)
So you did a search. You quit your job and did a search. You searched on the side. What did you do?

**Nick Haschka** (3:22)
So this was actually, this is my third search venture. I had done, my first one was an office plant company.